There's an anecdote about curl, but I'm not sure if there's enough in here to draw conclusions from. 20% of vulnerabilities have been made public, and many of those are marked as "withdrawn" or "duplicates". However, it's unclear whether the remaining 80% have not been made public because they're not fixed or real. In other words, this is analysis of survivors (public); not much can be said about those still under embargo.
And on top of that, it's a bit negative. How many millions of dollars is one perfect-10 scoring CVSS finding, total destruction style RCE, found in curl worth? Considering how many people use it.
It's worth zero millions dollars to curl. It might be worth something to attackers, but "wide use" is not the same as "the ability to compromise everyone" because most of the time, curl isn't used to automatically fetch untrusted URLs in a way that's controlled by the attacker from an environment they care about. It's worth much, much less than a 0-day in an iPhone or PHP. You'd need a buyer with a very specific itch to scratch and there won't be a bidding war.
By extension, if a vuln is worth something to attackers, it's probably also worth some fraction of it to the people the attackers may go after. But if you're an interesting target, your defense can't be based on the ability to find about every single software defect ahead of the time. You need layers. And if you have that, the importance of proactively acquiring every 0-day is diminished.
A client-side bug in a command line utility that is mostly used as a debugging tool or glue in shell scripts where the URL is not attacker controlled? Probably close to nothing. Maybe if you can find some other software which lets you run curl with an attacker controlled URL, you could package it up as an exploit for that piece of software, but it's not a common config.
It is bad if this points to a general pattern of AI being better at finding than fixing vulnerabilities. The larger that ratio, the harder to secure all the things. The current stat from this experiment is 37,966 to 217. Lots of false positives, but not enough to change the big picture. I hope they didn't apply equivalent tokens to both sides, or AI may be better at demolition than construction.
If anyone here hasn't experienced agents going into a loop finding "problems" and "fixing" them by adding more brittle complexity which introduces 10 more problems I'd be surprised. It's like the biggest experience of working with agents RN
The worst part is being thorough takes so much more work - they often do raise valid problems but you just can't set them in a loop because of this tendancy so you end up with way more work and hard questions
In my opinion, what tells a lot about AI provider AGI claims versus reality is the difficulty to have LLM provide the fix to issues.
For PHP2shell vulnerability for example, there was "patched" .deb (and equivalent) packages only for the most recent and most trendy distributions but countless older versions of distributions and php versions were like abandoned without simple solution.
I would have guess that "patches" and pre-built fixed packages would be flooding the world. And with just a prompt of one line, most servers would be properly patched. But no.
Very interesting that the conclusion of the article is so tightly aligned with the VulnCheck's business model! It's almost as if this is just a thinly veiled advertisement...
> The CVEs are a sliver of this year's total, almost none are being exploited, fixes have stalled while duplicates and withdrawals pile up, and the triage burden is shifting onto the open source maintainers Glasswing promised to help. The receipts keep coming in. They still don't reconcile.
> VulnCheck is helping organizations not just to solve the vulnerability prioritization challenge - we’re working to help equip any product manager, CSIRT/PSIRT or SecOps team and Threat Hunting team to get faster and more accurate with infinite efficiency using VulnCheck solutions.
But PHP thing was a lot of drama over something that was not super large easy to exploit hole. Just a normal "have to patch it and bye" medium kind issue.
People say this vulnerability was "not super large easy to exploit" because of one poorly-informed skeptical blog post that hit the top of HN, but the evidence strongly suggests that post was simply wrong, and we're just going to have to live with the misinformation until it decays.
At this point the play is simply to move the goalposts, suggesting that vulnerabilities don't matter so long as you yourself couldn't easily exploit them, regardless of what well-armed attackers can do with them. That's, obviously, not how software security works.
Does the author expect that every company using Glasswing/AI is going to credit the AI directly? I would not expect Microsoft or Cisco to credit Anthropic if one of their internal teams uses AI to discover a CVE in their code.
By extension, if a vuln is worth something to attackers, it's probably also worth some fraction of it to the people the attackers may go after. But if you're an interesting target, your defense can't be based on the ability to find about every single software defect ahead of the time. You need layers. And if you have that, the importance of proactively acquiring every 0-day is diminished.
Which I'm fine with really, but it means you need to be very careful letting it iterate on code until it finds no problems.
The worst part is being thorough takes so much more work - they often do raise valid problems but you just can't set them in a loop because of this tendancy so you end up with way more work and hard questions
So the article is making a sweeping statement based on the 19.4% of publicly disclosed CVEs?
That statistic suggests the opposite. I'm sure government is aware of many back doors they keep secret and prefer them to remain secret.
For PHP2shell vulnerability for example, there was "patched" .deb (and equivalent) packages only for the most recent and most trendy distributions but countless older versions of distributions and php versions were like abandoned without simple solution. I would have guess that "patches" and pre-built fixed packages would be flooding the world. And with just a prompt of one line, most servers would be properly patched. But no.
> The CVEs are a sliver of this year's total, almost none are being exploited, fixes have stalled while duplicates and withdrawals pile up, and the triage burden is shifting onto the open source maintainers Glasswing promised to help. The receipts keep coming in. They still don't reconcile.
> VulnCheck is helping organizations not just to solve the vulnerability prioritization challenge - we’re working to help equip any product manager, CSIRT/PSIRT or SecOps team and Threat Hunting team to get faster and more accurate with infinite efficiency using VulnCheck solutions.
Sure LLMs have helped reduce the attack surface and we patch things faster too, but I was really expected a few more Supermarket-level bangers.
At this point the play is simply to move the goalposts, suggesting that vulnerabilities don't matter so long as you yourself couldn't easily exploit them, regardless of what well-armed attackers can do with them. That's, obviously, not how software security works.
Apply sarcasm or not based on sleep deprivation.